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Corrupt Flash Player install after IE 7 upgrade

I’ve been seeing a few mails about this since the Internet Explorer update was released, so I wanted to post some info about it to maybe help the people having issues.

The complaint generally goes something like this:

A user has Flash Player 9 (or other version) installed on their system and everything works fine with IE6. That user then runs the IE7 update and their computer stops showing Flash content on sites like YouTube or MSN video and other Flash sites. However, if the user goes to some other sites with Flash content, the content will play just fine, even if the site requires the Flash 9 Player.

I’m not sure of the official cause for this, and am still doing some research into what causes it, but a first guess I have is that when you upgrade from IE7, the browser install is not correctly reinstalling your existing Flash Plugin, so scripts that check for the Flash Player are failing, but since the plugin file is there, if you visit a site that does not use a detection script (like SWFObject) you will see the Flash content just fine.

There may not be a solution to this for the sites using detection scripts – they rely on a series of Windows registry entries that seem to be missing after an IE7 upgrade.

For users, here is a fix that seems to work well:

Quit all open programs. This step is important because other programs may be using the Flash Player, and if they are, the uninstaller will fail silently.

If you are still having problems after running the uninstaller and reinstalling the plugin, please post a comment with your system setup and other relevant details. (And remember, sometimes a system restart can make a difference with problems like this, so try that first).

221 thoughts on “Corrupt Flash Player install after IE 7 upgrade”

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Without getting into the technical details, mp3 is a music format that can be highly compressed and still retain high quality sound. How compressed? Well a standard 650 Mb music CD contains around 18 songs at most. My personal record is 197 high quality mp3 songs on one CD. download mp3 music

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If you get paid for every CD bought with your name on it and you found out that anyone anywhere could download your whole CD in an hours for free, how scared would you be?

My friend (I’ll call him Jake) is a huge Kid Rock fan. Well, at least he is now.

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So did he buy the CD? No. He already had the songs available and any CD he got would’ve just been played in his home office where his computer is anyway.

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Could Jake afford the CD? Of course, but didn’t want to waste money on a CD. Of course the money he spent at the concerts were much more than the price of one compact disc.

the amount of money abode (sic) wants for flash encoding now…. it
solidifies my encouragement of people not to use it at all.
my latest guess is that the ATI card that some of us with real issues have
combined with flash9 and IE7 is enough to curdle any web builder’s brains.

Why do Microsoft have to be so awkward!!! There are never any issues like this with other browsers such as Firefox which is 10 times better in my opinion. They should be fined for messing everyones computers up and wasting the time of web developers who have to fix these problems which are caused by their updates and browser!!! Unfortunately the masses will still use IE though as that Bill Gates was clever enough to corner the market and install his crappy operating system on every computer made grrrr! :(

I have searched the net to find a solution to this problem for days with no luck. I happened across this site and I realized instantly that the people here know what they are talking about!!! I couldn’t view most flash presentations or embedded Flash objects after a recent IE update. Most on StupidVideo.com. I’m sure some of the problem is sites not updating their code to keep up with MS. I was getting a blank placeholder where the flash object should’ve been. Also an error on page … ‘undefined’ is not an object. I downloaded and ran the Flash Uninstaller mentioned in the opening of this page (thanks for the link). I restarted IE and followed the other link for the Flash Installer page and reinstalled it. Everything is back to normal. Problem resolved with your help. Thanks a million!!!

Thanks a million for the SWFObject script from Deconcept, but since last update from adobe my flash content doesn’t play in IE. I embed the flash animation with SWFObject on my site about real estate and Bulgarian Properties Home link. Question is folks do you know a way of successfully embedding the flash with SWFObject since last flash player update or shall we wait for a fix from adobe.